An Industry 4.0 lens

With hardware miniaturization outpacing itself every 2 years (Moore’s law), we have seen CPUs and GPUs cramming billions of transistors onto chips that are nanometers big. The availability of highly performant computing comes at a cost, although production at scale has democratized the use of this technology in our daily lives. The explosion of cloud computing and its ease of adoption through intuitive software have powered everyday items such as smartphones and wearables, which are smaller yet more powerful than supercomputers from 5 decades ago. That said, the past decade has seen exponential growth in the availability of high-end sensors that sense their environment to process data and act (edge computing) or transmit data over purpose-built protocols, securely and reliably over longer ranges at radio frequency. This data can be relayed over 5G or the internet to data centers for further processing. With analytics and data science, we try to make sense...